(GA) —FTLIVELONG — Cardiologist Ricihard Flanigan, left, and daughter, Dr. Kate Falingan Sawyer, who is a preventive medicine specialist, have written a book about how to add 20 years to your life–by eating well, exercising and monitoring risk. They are photographed at Presbyterian/St. Luke’s hospital on September 26, 2007. Glenn Asakawa / The Denver Post

In a world where we’re bombarded one minute with messages about eating right and exercising, and tempted the next with ads for thick, juicy, artery-clogging cheeseburgers, it’s easy to chew first and repent later.

But if you want to be able to swing a tennis racket or twirl around the dance floor when you’re in your 80s, you need to be doing more than watching what you eat and hitting the treadmill.

A big part of staying healthy is stuff your mom always told you: Don’t smoke, take your vitamins. But some advice is more a product of our times – get a heart scan, have your carotid arteries checked, start taking statins if your cholesterol is too high.

A father-daughter doctor team in Denver lays out these ideas and others in “Longevity Made Simple: How to Add 20 Good Years to Your Life” (Williams Clark Publishing, $13.95), a book hitting stores this week. The authors are cardiologist Richard J. Flanigan and his daughter, Kate Flanigan Sawyer, a medical doctor and co-director with her dad of the Heart and Health Prevention Center.

Flanigan, 68, has the physique of a much younger man, thanks in part to his 40-plus years as a competitive rower. He recently returned from a master’s rowing competition in Croatia and never forgets that he gave up a chance to be on the U.S. Olympic team in order to keep his spot in medical school. Sawyer, 37, is tall and slender like her father, and has a pancake-flat stomach that belies the fact that she has 3- and 5-year-old children.

The doctors have become the poster kids for health in Denver, posing for KUSA-TV’s 9HealthFair ads and doing public service commercials for healthful eating. Flanigan is asked to speak more than 100 times annually, and Sawyer has served as the on-camera medical expert for the annual 10-day 9HealthFair.

Flanigan has been giving talks on the topic of longevity for more than 20 years and pulls a VHS tape from a corner of his office to prove it.

He says he always wanted to write a book on the subject, but the process didn’t start until he was giving a talk to a school group three years ago and was approached by a couple who own a publishing house that specializes in books on health and medicine. “I had kept up with research, and Kate has the communications skills, so we decided to do it,” he says, noting that he has followed studies – many of them conflicting – on exercise, diet and what ails Americans.

Both Sawyer and Flanigan lament that only 3 percent of Americans (and a paltry 4 percent of health professionals) practice four standard health habits: follow a nutritious diet, exercise regularly, keep weight under control and avoid smoking. “Our diets are atrocious,” Sawyer says.

Because close to 60 percent of all deaths in the United States are from heart disease, stroke or cancer, the authors devote a lot of space on how to prevent them from occurring in the first place.

Between the covers of their 195-page paperback book are simple charts and graphs, lists, diagrams and, in the back, recipes, courtesy of Denver doctor Richard Collins, the “cooking cardiologist.”

They also include a list of 22 superfoods and recommended supplements. “Taking a multivitamin isn’t a magic bullet but more for insurance,” Sawyer says. Flanigan also takes a daily fish-oil capsule for its heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids.

Both doctors talk about the progress they’ve seen in patients with heart disease who’ve made lifestyle changes.

Flanigan says the most profound medical advancement he’s seen in his career is that heart problems can be fixed. “We now have proof of reversal of heart disease when people do all the right things,” he says.

He’s also a fan of testing, particularly for people who have risk factors for heart disease or various types of cancer.

In addition to regular cholesterol screening, Flanigan advises having a heart scan to check levels of coronary artery calcium, an electrocardiogram to check heart function and a carotid artery ultrasound, among other procedures. While many of the tests aren’t covered by insurance, he says they’re a good investment.

We live in a time when there’s a lot you can do to live a long, healthy life, so take advantage of it, Flanigan says.

“I had a patient two weeks ago who had laser surgery and both knees replaced. He told me that if it were not for modern medicine, he’d be a blind cripple. I’d like to see the day when more people have on their death certificates that they’d died of old age than heart disease or cancer.”

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